Here is the full transcript of Steven Zanella’s talk titled “Breaking The Anxiety Cycle Through Kindness” at TEDxAmoskeagMillyard conference.
SUMMARY: Steven Zanella’s TEDx talk, “Breaking The Anxiety Cycle Through Kindness,” is a compelling narrative of his personal journey overcoming anxiety disorder. He candidly shares the constant barrage of “What if?” questions that plagued his mind, detailing how this internal dialogue fueled his anxiety from childhood through adulthood.
Zanella reveals his struggle with panic attacks, the negative impact of trying to self-medicate with alcohol, and the societal stigma surrounding mental health issues. A turning point in his story comes with the birth of his daughter, which prompts him to re-evaluate his approach to managing anxiety. He adopts a strategy of self-kindness, inspired by the unconditional love and support he feels for his daughter, leading to significant improvements in his mental health.
Zanella’s talk is a powerful testament to the transformative potential of self-compassion and positive thinking in breaking the cycle of anxiety.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Overcoming Anxiety
“What if I can’t do this?” “What if I have a panic attack?” “What if I start sweating and completely freak out?” “What if all those people who doubted me, what if they were right?” “What if there’s something wrong with me?” “What if I can’t get over my fear?” Those were the kinds of thoughts that I constantly heard in my head every second of every day, from the moment I woke up until the moment I fell asleep.
Sitting in a meeting at work, hanging out with my friends, even sitting at home alone on my couch, my mind never stopped racing, it never stopped worrying, asking, “What if?” For most of my life, I’ve suffered with anxiety disorder, and it was exhausting. It took a toll on my job, on my health, on my marriage, on me. I wanted it to stop, but I didn’t know how. I kept thinking about how to try to fix it, how to make all of those anxious thoughts go away.
The more I thought about it, the more frustrated I became with myself. Why couldn’t I control my thinking? Why couldn’t I just be normal? I felt helpless and trapped, completely at the mercy of my own thinking. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it because I didn’t think that they would understand. How could they? I didn’t even understand.
I felt alone, completely alone. In truth, I wasn’t alone. I was one of 40 million adults. That’s one out of eight people in the US that suffer from some form of anxiety disorder. But that didn’t seem to matter to me. I still felt alone, like I was the only one. My mind told me that I was different, that I was odd, and I believed it. I believed it because this was my thinking, from my own mind.
Albert Einstein once said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” And as it’s turned out, I’ve been thinking the exact same way my entire life. I have very few memories of when I was really young, before my parents were divorced, but there’s one that stands out. I was about three, and I remember standing in the kitchen of the house that we grew up in, and my parents were there and they were fighting. My father was actually outside the front door. My mother had locked him out of the house.
Childhood Anxiety
I don’t recall how long they stood there yelling at each other through that door, but at one point my father called out to me and he said, “Steven, it’s your father. Open the door and let me in.” My mother looked at me and she said, “Steven, don’t open that door.” I felt lost, I felt scared, I didn’t know what to do. I felt as though every choice that I had was the wrong choice.
I just stood there. I don’t remember much about my childhood, but I remember that moment. It was the first time I recall feeling what I now recognize as anxiety, that, no matter what choice I made, it would be the wrong one; that no choices were good, they were all bad. And that was a feeling that has stuck with me.
Despite the smile on this little guy’s face, which is me, I was a really anxious kid growing up. I would lie in bed at night, I couldn’t sleep. I would stare into the darkness and I just kept thinking about everything. My brain was like a radio that someone had left on all night. My father was a police officer, and even though I was young, I knew that that was a dangerous profession, and I worried, I worried he’d get killed, that I’d never see my father again.
I thought about death a lot as a young child, a lot more than any kid should ever have to, and nothing my parents ever said seemed to ever console me or take away that feeling of sadness and of loss. As a teenager, my anxiety only got worse. I was always worried that I wasn’t as smart as the other kids, that I wouldn’t fit in, that I wasn’t like them, that I wouldn’t get good grades. I found it difficult to focus in school.
My mind was always racing and always worrying. I would sit down and I would try to study for a test, and I would read the same page, the same paragraph, the same word, over, and over, and over again, unable to focus on what it said because I was completely lost in my own thinking. “What if you stay up all night and study, and still fail? What if you’re just not that smart, and what if school just isn’t for you?”
The Struggle with Anxiety
Eventually, I became so frustrated that I stopped trying.
I was labeled “lazy” by my parents and my teachers. They’d become frustrated with me because they could see that I was giving up, and they didn’t know why. The more frustrated they became with me, the more closed off I became with them.
I became known as the talented kid who just didn’t try hard enough, but really I was a scared kid who didn’t believe himself enough. I was 22 when I had my first full-scale panic attack. It was during a job interview, and they walked me in and they sat me at this little table, in an even smaller room, and as we started talking, I became painfully aware that I was only half-listening to what we were saying to each other; the other half completely lost in that thinking, “They’re never going to hire you. What are you doing here? You’re wasting your time, you’re wasting their time, you can’t do this!”
I started to feel hot, like uncomfortably hot, like someone had turned the heat in the room all the way up. I couldn’t catch my breath. My chest started to feel tight. I started to feel uncomfortable in my own skin. I wanted to get up, I wanted to run out of that room, I wanted to be anywhere but where I was, but I couldn’t. I mean I was at a job interview. You can’t just get up and run out of a job interview. I felt trapped.
And then, the next thing I know, this little bead of sweat started running down my forehead, and it didn’t come alone. Soon, I was completely soaked in sweat. It was so bad that the woman conducting the interview actually stopped and was like, “Are you okay? Are you going to be alright? Do you need to take a minute?” I was completely mortified.
From that moment on, I had a completely new fear: panic attacks. And if you’ve never experienced one, first of all, you’re very lucky, but second of all, they come from your own worry, you create them yourself. So, the more you worry about having them, the more you have them. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So, at first, I tried to develop coping mechanisms to deal with my anxiety and my panic attacks. I would carry a bottle of ice-cold water everywhere that I went. In case I started to feel more uncomfortable, it might help cool me off and settle me down a little. I could never sit in between two people. I always felt confined and trapped. I needed space around me in case I needed to make a quick escape. I always had to sit at the end of the table. In a group like this, I would have to sit on the very end of the row.
I always tried to sit all the way in the back. I didn’t want to just be in the back, though. I wanted to be completely invisible. But these were only temporary fixes, these coping mechanisms, and eventually they began to fail because they weren’t addressing the real problem. And as they began to fail, I began avoiding things. I started calling out sick to work on days that we had big meetings. I stopped socializing with friends, I stopped going to see my family.
I avoided going out of the house at all costs. It was the only place that I felt safe and secure. When I had to go out and I couldn’t get out of it, I started to self-medicate: I used alcohol. I found that, after having a couple of drinks, my anxiety seemed a little bit more manageable and I felt a little more normal. And if a couple of drinks were good, a couple of drinks were even better. But soon I was drinking all the time.
Sadly, in our society, it’s far more acceptable to have a couple of drinks to “take the edge off” than it is to seek help for an anxiety disorder. There’s this stigma attached to mental disorders, as to why we’re not comfortable talking about them, or not comfortable sharing them. And, honestly, I’d rather have been seen as a person with a drinking problem than a person with a mental health problem. But now I had both.
On the outside, my life looked normal. I had a decent job, I got married, we bought a house, but on the inside, I felt weak and scared. I had no confidence whatsoever. I hated myself, I hated my anxiety, I hated that little voice that was in my head. I felt like I was surrounded by happy people living normal lives and I was just faking it. And I was worried that, someday, people would find out my secret, that I wasn’t normal, I wasn’t like everyone else.
I was physically unhealthy from years of drinking, and I was mentally unhealthy from years of stress and worry. My life wasn’t supposed to turn out like this, but had, and I felt powerless. So, I just kept moving forward, hoping for a miracle.
A New Beginning
That’s my miracle. I always wanted to be a dad. My dad was my hero growing up, and I wanted to be that for someone else. And even though I was always nervous, I thought being a dad I could do that, it was something I could handle. I would sit up with her late at night, I would look at her and I would think about the type of person she’d grow to become.
I wanted her to be everything that I wasn’t. I wanted her to be happy, to be strong, confident. I wanted her to follow her dreams, to live with passion. But I also worried… oh, I did. “What if she’s anxious like me? What if she worries? Or even worse, what if she has panic attacks? How can I help her deal with something that I never could?”
And I thought about it, and I thought, “What would I say to her if she came to me with this problem?” And I imagined that I would tell her, “Try not to worry so much,” that life has a way of working out, that she was an amazing person, and as long as she tried her best, it didn’t matter if she’d succeed or fail, because it was the trying that was the important part. And it was strange, as I heard these words in my head, that that sounds like pretty good advice! Why didn’t I ever take it? How can I expect her to listen to me if I wouldn’t even listen to me?
And then I realized something: I realized I never gave myself that advice! I was so busy telling myself that I couldn’t do things. I never stopped to wonder, “What if I told myself I could do things? What if I showed myself the same love and support that I felt for my daughter?” I had always approached my anxiety the same way, with anger and negativity. I needed to learn to be more positive, to let go of that anger.
So, from that moment, I made a decision: I decided I was going to parent myself the way I parented my daughter. So, every time I felt anxious or worried, I thought of her. I would never allow that voice to speak to her in a negative way. So, I’d no longer allow it to speak to me that way. I’d retrain that voice in my brain to speak to me the way that I imagined it would speak to her: with patience, love, and kindness. And it worked!
It actually worked. By picturing my daughter in place of myself, I was able to practice being more kind to myself and to replace those negative thoughts with positive ones. Negative thinking had become a habit to me, and if you think about it, a habit is something that we just practice over, and over, and over again, until we become experts at it. And I had become an expert at negative thinking and beating myself up. And breaking habits is very, very hard, but developing new habits, that’s much easier.
When it came to my anxiety, I’d spent all of those years focused on breaking the habit of anxious thinking. What I needed to do was focus on building a new habit: positive thinking. And all it would take is practice and time. My anxiety didn’t develop overnight, it wasn’t going away overnight. And just because you’re a more positive person, it doesn’t mean that negative things don’t happen in your life.
Shortly after the birth of our second child, Noah, my marriage ended. I suddenly found myself sleeping on a mattress, on the floor of a one-bedroom apartment, working three jobs to try to make ends meet. And while to the outside world it seemed that my life had completely fallen apart, it had actually begun to fall back into place. I used my situation as an opportunity, an opportunity to practice living in the moment.
For the first time in my life, I had no idea what tomorrow held. I had always seen my life as being completely planned out before me: that I would grow up, I’d get a job, I’d meet a girl, we’d get married, start a family. But now all of that was gone. All I knew was that I needed to learn to find the joy in each moment as it unfolded, and tomorrow would have to take care of itself.
The future was always something that I feared, but now, thanks to practicing being more positive, I was able to see it not as something to be fearful of, but as infinite potential. Life had stripped me of everything that I thought I was. I love this quote. J. K. Rowling said this, “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” That’s what I did.
I took small steps and I began putting my life back together, but in a positive way. I fixed the things that I could fix, and I learned to let go of the things that I couldn’t. I stopped focusing on what might happen in the future, and I let go of the things that had happened in the past. Instead, I focused on loving and supporting myself and my children, in the present moment.
You see, the present moment is all that we ever have. The future is ahead of us, it hasn’t happened, and the past, that’s yesterday, that’s behind us. And when you’re anxious like me, you spend all of your time living in the future, worrying about a possible future that might happen, and when you do that, you miss everything that’s happening right now. This very moment that we’re all sitting here, this is the only time we live our lives, in this moment. This moment is where we find our happiness, and it’s where I found my peace.
And today my life is nothing like I ever thought it would be, but so much more than I could have ever imagined. I learned to open my heart, and I met an amazing woman. I fell in love with her and she fell in love with me, the real me, the me that had been buried under all of that fear and anxiety, but had always been there. We got married and had this amazing little guy named Camden. He is the happiest baby and he makes me smile every single day.
Lily and Noah love their little brother to pieces! And I couldn’t ask for three more amazing children. I now feel like I can be the father and the husband that I was always meant to be. I now look at each day not as something to fear, but as a gift, a chance to practice being grateful for the things that I have, to practice being mindful of the moments that make our lives special, and to practice showing love and kindness to myself and to others.
And that little voice, it’s still there. It’s a little quieter now, but it still asks, “What if? What if I overcome my anxiety and my fears? What if I accomplish even more than I ever thought I could? What if my story could help someone else who is suffering from anxiety?” What if we all learn to face our fears and stop being so afraid of things? What if each one of us practices showing a little more kindness to ourselves and to everyone else? What if?